Form is the easiest thing in the world to preserve. A building, a title, a procedure, a press release; these can survive long after the function they were built to perform has quietly slipped out the back door. We do not notice because the lights are still on. We do not notice because the people inside still have business cards. We do not notice because the word for the thing is still being used in sentences that sound like they describe reality. What does it mean that an entire civilization has reached the moment where almost every institution it depends on is performing the gestures of its own purpose while doing something else entirely, and that the gap between the two has become, somehow, the place where we now live?
A Regime of Hollowing
There is a word being used this week, in cables and press releases and the lower thirds of cable news, that no longer means what it used to mean. The Iran ceasefire was extended indefinitely on April 21, after the failure of the Islamabad talks earlier this month. Since the original pause began on April 8, the United States Navy has imposed a blockade on Iranian ports, turned back thirty-one vessels, and fired on the M/V Touska. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard, in turn, attacked three ships in a single morning this week in the Strait of Hormuz, seizing two of them. Brent crude is hovering above ninety-nine dollars. Twenty thousand seafarers are stranded across the Persian Gulf. Lufthansa has cancelled twenty thousand flights. A port worker is dead in Bahrain. And both governments continue, with straight faces and at lecterns and over State Department feeds, to call this a ceasefire.
It would be tempting to call this a lie, and to be done with it. But it is not, in any meaningful sense, a lie, because nobody is being deceived. The Iranian foreign minister has said publicly that blockading ports is an act of war. The White House press secretary has said publicly that seizures of foreign vessels do not violate the ceasefire because the vessels are not American or Israeli. The European Union’s foreign-policy chief, Kaja Kallas, has called the daily reversals reckless. Insurance underwriters, oil traders, sovereign-debt analysts, shipping clerks, every working person whose livelihood touches the Persian Gulf, are pricing the situation as war. Everyone in the system knows. The word “ceasefire” still occupies its slot in the diplomatic vocabulary, defended on schedule, anchoring sanctions law, governing the legal status of every party. It just no longer points at any actual cessation of fire.
Something has happened here. Not to the war, which has its own logic, but to the word, and to the institution that issued it. The form of “ceasefire” has not collapsed; it is being deployed with full bureaucratic seriousness. But the function it once performed, that of marking a space in which fire has actually ceased, has migrated somewhere else, or evaporated, or been quietly reassigned to a different task. To call this corruption is to be too generous, since corruption presupposes a working machine being abused, and there is no working machine here being abused. The ceasefire is operating exactly as designed. The design has simply detached from the function.
This is the structural signature of nearly every major American institution this week, and I think it is the central political fact of our moment. The form persists. The function has gone elsewhere. There is no good name for the condition yet, which is part of why it spreads so easily. I want to give it one. I want to call it hollowing.
A hollowed institution is not corrupt and not collapsed. It is fully staffed, professionally led, generously funded, ceremonially intact. It produces paperwork and press releases. It convenes. It deliberates. It issues findings and rulings and reports. Its building looks the same. Its budget grows. Its alumni lists are impressive. It will tell you, if asked, exactly what it does. And it will be wrong, and it will not know it is wrong, or it will know and not say, or it will know and say something else, and the discrepancy will not be noticed because the form has consumed the attention that the function once required.
Consider the longest shutdown in American history, which is happening right now, and which most of the country, when surveyed, cannot name correctly. Since February 14, the Department of Homeland Security has been unfunded. Today the count is sixty-nine. It long ago surpassed the thirty-five-day shutdown of 2018-19, which was previously the record. There are four-hour lines at Bush Intercontinental in Houston. ICE officers have been temporarily seconded to airport security. FEMA’s non-disaster operations are paused. The Coast Guard is preparing, again, to stop paying its sailors. Global Entry has stopped accepting new applications. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is operating at degraded capacity at a moment of escalating cyber threats. By every conventional metric, the institution called the Department of Homeland Security has stopped working.
Except. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is operating at full capacity. Customs and Border Protection is operating at full capacity. The most politically charged, most visible, most controversial functions of DHS, the ones an ordinary citizen is most likely to associate with the agency’s name, have continued without interruption throughout the entire shutdown, insulated by separate funding from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025, supplemented by a ten-billion-dollar emergency tranche the President released. What is shut down is everything that is not enforcement. What is funded is enforcement.
You cannot understand what is happening at DHS by looking at its appropriations. The form of the agency, the official organization chart, says one thing. The functional reality, traced through the actual flow of money and people, says something else. Congress, in this story, performs its constitutional role of the power of the purse with great solemnity, voting and counter-voting, holding press conferences about negotiations, missing self-imposed deadlines, scoring partisan points. The Senate is presently in the middle of a budget reconciliation maneuver to fund ICE and Border Patrol for three and a half years through the President’s term, bypassing the filibuster. This is not “appropriations” as the word has historically meant. It is a workaround, by people who have publicly given up on the form, while continuing to use the form. Speaker Johnson refuses to bring the Senate-passed partial fix to the House floor. Republican fiscal hawks vote with Democrats to block their own party. The form looks like deadlock. The function is something else: the arming of one part of the agency at the expense of all the others, by means of an emergency mechanism that bypasses the very deliberative architecture the form is supposed to embody. The shutdown is not a failure of the appropriations process. It is its current product.
Now move to a Monday in Montgomery, Alabama, where on April 21 a federal grand jury returned an eleven-count indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center. Six counts of wire fraud, four counts of false statements to a federally insured bank, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. The allegation: that between 2014 and 2023 the SPLC funneled more than three million dollars through fictitious entities to at least nine field sources affiliated with the Klan, the Aryan Nations, the National Socialist Movement, and similar organizations. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the President’s former personal attorney in two prior criminal matters, announced the case. FBI Director Kash Patel stood beside him. The indictment was framed as protection of donors who, the government argues, did not know that some of their contributions were ultimately reaching extremists.
The factual basis of the indictment is real. The SPLC did pay informants. It did so through shell entities. It did so for forty years, since 1981, when its first office in Montgomery was firebombed by Klansmen and it concluded that intelligence gathering was a matter of physical survival. It did so to win the largest civil judgments ever obtained against organized hate groups: seven million dollars against the United Klans of America in 1987, twelve and a half million against Tom Metzger and the White Aryan Resistance in 1990, six point three million against the Aryan Nations in 2000. The work, if the word means anything, saved lives.
What is striking about the indictment is not that the facts are wrong. It is that the legal theory under which those facts become a crime is, by the assessment of former Justice Department fraud officials and several of the country’s senior white-collar scholars, paper-thin. Columbia Law’s John Coffee called the wire-fraud counts inadequately pleaded and noted that the SPLC was under no duty to disclose to the world that it was paying secret agents. A former assistant chief of the DOJ fraud section said he was surprised anyone would charge a case like this. The bank-fraud statute being used has a circuit split on whether opening checking accounts even falls within it; the Eleventh Circuit, which will hear this, has not ruled. The secrecy theory of harm collides with the awkward fact that the United Klans of America’s own newsletter, the Fiery Cross, warned its members in 1981 that Klanwatch had placed informants in their organization. The Klan knew. The donors who gave to fight the Klan have, throughout, been told the SPLC operates an intelligence project. The fraud, in any historical or legal sense the words have ever borne, is hard to find.
What is easy to find is the political vector. In October 2025 the FBI severed its working relationship with the SPLC, a relationship that had functioned across multiple administrations. After Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September, the SPLC’s classification of Kirk’s organization on its hate map became a point of conservative grievance. The current Justice Department leadership has, in public statements, described the SPLC as a “partisan smear machine” and an organization that “manufactures racism to justify its existence.” The indictment is, in form, an exercise of independent prosecutorial judgment by career attorneys at the Middle District of Alabama. In function, it is the criminal-law arm of a political project against a designated adversary, using a legal theory that the prosecutorial profession itself does not generally credit. The form of the prosecution and the function of the prosecution have come unstuck.
I do not mean by this to defend the SPLC, which has its own institutional issues, including a serious internal accounting of workplace racism three years ago that drove out its founding leadership. I mean only that what is happening on April 21 in Montgomery is a Justice Department doing the gestures of impartial federal law enforcement while doing something its own veterans recognize as something else. This is not a Justice Department abusing its power within the form. This is a Justice Department in which the form has become a wrapper around a different operation. The press release reads “indictment.” What is being delivered is a message.
Or look across the Mall, at the Federal Reserve, which on April 15 the President threatened to remove its Chair from by May 15. The Justice Department has opened a criminal probe of Jerome Powell over the cost overruns on the renovation of the Eccles Building. Federal officials physically attempted to enter the Fed’s premises this month and were turned away at the door. Kevin Warsh, in his confirmation hearing on April 21 to replace Powell, was asked under oath whether he would be a “sock puppet,” and felt obliged to deny it. The form of the Federal Reserve, an independent central bank insulated by statute and tradition from political pressure, is intact. Its board still meets. Its dot plots are still issued. Its press conferences still happen. The function the form is supposed to perform, which is monetary policy free from electoral pressure, is being directly attacked through the criminalization of a building renovation. The form persists; the function has been forced into a continuous defensive crouch, which is not the function it was designed to perform.
You can run the same diagnostic at the Federal Communications Commission, where on April 23 shareholders approved an eighty-one-billion-dollar takeover that brings CBS News and CNN under one corporate roof controlled by the Ellison family, who are politically aligned with the administration. The earlier Paramount-Skydance merger, which the FCC approved, was preceded by Paramount paying the President sixteen million dollars to settle a personal lawsuit against CBS over a 60 Minutes edit. The new editor-in-chief of CBS News is Bari Weiss. A senior producer, Mary Walsh, on resigning, said her superiors had told her to “aim our reporting at a particular part of the political spectrum,” and that she did not know how to do that. The FCC is an institution that exists, by statute, to regulate broadcast in the public interest. Its form is unchanged: dockets, comment periods, commissioners, commissioner-statements. Its function appears to be the trading of regulatory approvals for editorial outcomes. The form is unaltered; the function is no longer in the same building.
I could keep going for some time. The Environmental Protection Agency on April 20 finalized the rescission of the 2009 endangerment finding, the legal-scientific premise of every air-pollution regulation under the Clean Air Act for the past sixteen years. The form remains: an agency mandated by Congress to protect human health and the environment. The function is now actively dismantling the conditions under which that mandate could be carried out. The Centers for Disease Control’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices has had its charter rewritten to weight committee membership toward people who have personally experienced “vaccine injuries”; the form is a federal scientific advisory body, the function is the credentialing of skepticism. The Securities and Exchange Commission has refused to defend its own climate-disclosure rules in court while also refusing to formally rescind them through proper Administrative Procedure Act process, leaving the rules technically in force but, as the Eighth Circuit had to point out last fall, in a kind of regulatory undead state. The form is rulemaking; the function is non-rule. Congress holds appropriations hearings, like the ones at which RFK Jr. and Treasury Secretary Bessent appeared this past Tuesday and Wednesday, as a kind of theatrical display in which budgets are submitted, denounced, and unaltered. The form is oversight. The function is venting. The hearing is real. The hearing does nothing.
There is a temptation, when one starts to see this pattern, to reach for the available vocabulary. Deep state. Administrative state. Late capitalism. Kakistocracy. Each of these terms captures something. None of them captures this. Deep state implies a hidden cabal with coherent agency operating beneath the official one; what I am describing has no cabal, and is not coherent, and is not strictly hidden. The administrative state critique is a constitutional complaint about the locus of power; it does not address the gap between what an institution claims to do and what it actually does. Late capitalism is a mood, not a mechanism. Kakistocracy attributes to bad actors what is in fact a systemic property. None of these existing frames sees what is happening on the institutional surface, where the form continues to look exactly like itself while doing something its own form does not describe.
Hollowing is also not the same thing as the older sociological idea of decoupling, which the field has known about since 1977, when John Meyer and Brian Rowan observed that organizations routinely decouple their formal structure from their actual operations as a way of acquiring legitimacy without paying its full operational cost. Decoupling is a normal and even healthy feature of complex organizations; without some of it, every bureaucracy would seize up under the weight of its own contradictions. What is happening now is something else. Decoupling at scale, across most major institutions, in the same direction, at the same time, with no remaining institutional counterweight to repair the gap, becomes a different phenomenon. It becomes a regime.
A regime of hollowing is what we are now living inside. It is an environment in which the announcing institution and the operating institution have been split apart, and in which our political and journalistic vocabulary has not yet caught up to the split. We are still describing American public life with sentences whose subjects no longer perform the actions the verbs assign them. The Department of Justice indicts. The Federal Reserve sets interest rates. The Federal Communications Commission regulates in the public interest. The Department of Homeland Security secures the homeland. Congress appropriates. Each of these sentences is technically true and substantively wrong, in different proportions across different days, and the proportions are getting worse. The institutions are still the subjects. The verbs are still attached. But the sentences no longer describe what is actually happening in the rooms.
This is, I think, why the country feels the way it does this spring. The President’s approval sits at thirty-seven percent in the NBC News Decision Desk Poll, with two-thirds of Americans saying the country is on the wrong track, the most pessimistic reading of the second term. But the same diagnosis would have surfaced under different leadership, and did, with different proportions and different villains. The discontent is not really about a person, although it attaches to persons. It is about a low-grade, continuous experience of being lied to by institutions that are not technically lying, of being governed by mechanisms that are not technically broken, of trying to read sentences whose grammar is intact and whose meaning has gone missing. People sense that the form and the function have come apart. They cannot say where, exactly, the function went. They look at the formal institutions and the formal institutions reassure them that everything is in order. The reassurance is itself part of the problem.
Which raises the question that will define the rest of this essay, and to which I will turn in the next part. If the form persists and the function has migrated, where, exactly, has the function gone? Function does not simply evaporate. Decisions are still being made. Resources are still being allocated. Power is still being exercised. If the Federal Communications Commission no longer regulates broadcast in the public interest, somebody is regulating something according to some criterion. If the Justice Department no longer enforces neutral law, prosecutorial decisions are still being taken according to some logic. If Congress does not appropriate, money still moves. The function of an institution does not vanish when the form decouples from it. The function reappears somewhere else, often without a name, often at lower visibility, often in the hands of people who do not appear in any organizational chart. To understand hollowing, one has to follow the function out of the form and find out where it has gone.
Three forms of migration will turn out to matter. The function can move outward, into private actors who absorb the work the institution no longer does. It can move inward, into the personal authority of whoever happens to hold the office, untethered from the constraints the office once carried. Or it can move into ritual, where the gestures continue to be performed, and meaning is generated by the gesture itself, without any underlying instrumental result. American institutions in 2026 are doing all three at once, in different proportions, and the interaction is what gives the present moment its peculiar quality of motion-without-progress. We are extremely busy. We are doing very little. And the busyness is not an accident, or a distraction from the important work, but the most reliable signature of the work that has actually replaced it.
The Politics of Where the Function Went
The function does not vanish. This is the first thing to grasp when looking at a hollowed institution, and it is the part most observers get wrong, because the visual impression is one of emptiness and the available vocabulary is one of decay. But emptiness and decay describe what is no longer present in the form, not what is now present somewhere else. Power, when it leaves an institution, does not dissipate. It relocates. The Federal Reserve under attack from a hostile Justice Department is not a Federal Reserve in which monetary policy has stopped being made. It is a Federal Reserve in which the question of who makes monetary policy, and according to what criteria, has begun to be answered outside the building, by people whose authority is informal, whose deliberations are not minuted, and whose accountability runs through different channels than the ones the Federal Reserve Act constructs. The form continues to publish dot plots. The function has gone for a walk.
Once you start looking for the migration, you start finding it everywhere, and you start to notice that it tends to go in three particular directions. Function exits the institution either outward, into private actors who absorb the work; or inward, into the personal authority of whoever happens to hold the office; or sideways, into ritual, where the gesture itself becomes the thing produced. Most major American institutions in 2026 are leaking function in at least two of these directions simultaneously, and the largest ones are leaking in all three. Each migration leaves the institutional shell intact. None of them is announced. Each is reversible in principle and very difficult to reverse in practice.
The outward migration is the most studied and least understood. We have several decades of literature on privatization, contracting, regulatory capture, the revolving door, public-private partnerships, the rise of consultancies, and the long process by which functions once performed by public institutions came to be performed by private ones operating under public contract. McKinsey is now part of how the federal government thinks about itself; Booz Allen Hamilton is part of how it surveils itself; Palantir is part of how it sees itself; CoreCivic and GEO Group operate the carceral architecture. None of this is hidden. What is harder to see is that the outward migration of function is not only about contracting. It is also about the way real decision authority drifts toward whoever holds the data, whoever holds the operational expertise, and whoever has the resources to act while the formal institution is still drafting its memo. The 142 activist groups across 24 states blocking sixty-four billion dollars in data center construction are not, in any official sense, the entity making national infrastructure policy. The Department of Energy is. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is. State public utility commissions are. But the actual decisions about where the AI build-out happens, on what timeline, under what conditions, with what concessions to local water tables and electricity grids, are increasingly being made in county zoning boards in Prince William County, Virginia, and in planning commissions in Brandy Station, and in courtrooms in Memphis where the NAACP is suing xAI under the Clean Air Act. The form of national industrial policy is intact. The function is being performed by people whose names do not appear in the Federal Register.
This is the cleanest case of outward migration in current American life, and it is worth dwelling on because it shows the pattern in something close to its pure form. The federal government has set the policy direction; it favors AI infrastructure, it has waived environmental review where it could, it has moved billions in subsidies. None of this matters at the resolution at which decisions are actually being made. Sixty-four billion dollars in projects are blocked or delayed. The figure comes from an industry-friendly source and may understate or overstate the true number; what is not in dispute is that the work of deciding which projects happen has been pulled, by activists and judges and elected county supervisors, out of the federal apparatus that nominally controls it, and reconstituted at a level of granularity at which the federal apparatus cannot operate. The form of federal policy still issues its declarations. The function has been redistributed to a few thousand people the policy has never heard of, who are using the only tools available to them, which are zoning law and tort law and local elections. This is what outward migration looks like when it works: the institution remains, the policy remains, the function leaves the building.
The inward migration is less examined and more dangerous. It is the process by which formal institutional authority, once distributed across procedures, statutes, traditions, and the felt obligations of an office, collapses into the personal will of whoever is currently sitting in the chair. The form remains: the chair, the title, the legal powers, the seal. The function changes character entirely. An office that once mediated decisions through a process becomes an office that issues decisions as personal pronouncements. A Justice Department that once channeled prosecutorial judgment through written guidelines, internal review, and the inherited norms of a profession becomes a Justice Department in which the Acting Attorney General, who was the President’s personal criminal-defense lawyer in two prior matters, can decide that the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization whose internal politics he plainly dislikes, is to be indicted on a legal theory that former Justice Department fraud officials cannot follow. The form is an indictment. The function is a decision by one person, with the institutional machinery wrapped around the decision afterward to make it look like a process.
Inward migration is what people are perceiving when they describe a “personalist” turn in American governance, but the language of personalism does not quite reach what is happening. Personalism, in its political-science usage, describes regimes in which personal loyalty replaces institutional rule. Hollowing-by-inward-migration is something subtler. The institutions are not abolished. The forms are not denounced. The career professionals are not always dismissed. What changes is that the institutional output, which once emerged from a recognizable process of debate and procedural constraint, increasingly emerges as a downstream rationalization of a decision already taken at the top. The career staff are still there, and they may even still be doing real work. They are doing it on a leash whose length is set day to day. Kevin Warsh, in his confirmation hearing this week, was asked under oath whether he would be a “sock puppet” of the President if confirmed as Federal Reserve Chair. The fact that the question had to be asked, and that an experienced central banker had to answer it on a public record, is the diagnostic. The form of independent confirmation hearings is being conducted with full ceremony. The function being interrogated is whether the Federal Reserve, as an independent institution, will continue to exist after the chair changes.
The third direction, sideways into ritual, is the one Václav Havel saw most clearly, and it is the most difficult to write about because the language tends to come out either too cynical or too reverent. Havel’s greengrocer, who places the slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” in his shop window not because he believes it but because the act of placing it is what signals that he is the kind of person who can be left in peace, is not exactly a liar. He is a participant in a ritual whose function is no longer to communicate the propositional content of its words. The slogan does work. The work it does is to mark the greengrocer as compliant, to fold him into a system of mutually reinforcing gestures, and to allow the system to continue even though no one in particular believes the formal claims it makes about itself. This is the third migration: the function of an institution becomes the performance of the institution, and the performance is real, and the performance is what is being produced and consumed, and the original instrumental purpose has receded so far that bringing it up at all begins to seem naïve.
The Iran ceasefire is a ritual in this sense. Everyone involved understands that the formal claim, the cessation of fire, has not been honored and is not going to be. The reaffirmation of the ceasefire by the Pakistani intermediary, by the American White House, by the Iranian foreign ministry, is not a description of conditions on the water. It is a performance of diplomatic continuity, a marker that allows the parties to remain in something the international system can recognize as a managed crisis rather than an open war. The performance has functions. It allows the oil markets to price short-term volatility rather than catastrophic loss. It allows the affected governments to continue cabinet meetings about other subjects. It allows the United Nations Security Council to defer its own confrontation with the breakdown. None of these functions is the function the word “ceasefire” was designed to perform. They are functions the ritual of declaring a ceasefire performs, in the absence of a real one. The performance is not unimportant. It is doing real work in the world. It is just doing different work than the work the form claims.
A great deal of contemporary American institutional life is now in this third condition. The congressional hearings at which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Scott Bessent appeared this week, on FY 2027 budgets that include twelve-and-a-half percent cuts to Health and Human Services and the elimination of twenty-eight thousand IRS employees, were not really hearings in the original sense, in which a legislative body gathers information from the executive branch in order to exercise its appropriations and oversight powers. The hearings were rituals, in which the legislators performed the gestures of oversight, and the secretaries performed the gestures of accountability, and the underlying decisions, about whether the IRS will retain the capacity to audit high-income filers, were unaffected by the proceedings. Both sides knew this. The audience knew this. The press knew this. The hearings happened anyway, with the full machinery of microphones and ranking members and the entering of statements into the record, and at the end of the day the budget submissions were unaltered. The form of legislative oversight was honored. The function went sideways into theater. This is not a complaint. It is a description.
Once you can see the three migrations, certain questions become unavoidable. The first is whether hollowing has a direction. Forms decouple from functions in every era; this is what Meyer and Rowan demonstrated in 1977 about all formal organizations everywhere, and what Tilly suggested when he described the modern state itself as a kind of legitimized protection racket. The decoupling is not new. What is new, or at least newly intense, is the simultaneity. American institutions across the entire matrix, from the federal agencies to the regulatory commissions to the judiciary to the universities to the media organizations to the credentialing professions to the advisory committees to the central banks, are leaking function at the same time, in compatible directions, with no remaining counterweight to pull any one of them back into alignment. Hollowing in any single institution is a normal pathology. Hollowing across all of them at once is something else. It is a regime.
The second question is whether the hollowing is reversible. The honest answer is that nobody knows, because hollowing of this kind has not been studied at this scale in a polity this complex with information environments this saturated. There are partial historical analogies, which are useful so long as one does not lean on them too hard. The late Soviet Union, where the form of socialism continued long after its function had been delegated to the black market and the apparat, eventually collapsed, although the hollowing itself was not the proximate cause; what collapsed was the political will to keep performing the form. The late Roman Republic preserved its formal institutions for generations after the actual function of self-governance had migrated to the personalized military-clientelist networks of figures like Marius and Sulla, until the form was finally abandoned for the imperial structure that replaced it. The Habsburg monarchy in its last decades preserved its full ceremonial apparatus while the function of governance had been redistributed across a patchwork of nationalist movements, ethnic compromises, and informal accommodations that the formal institution could neither acknowledge nor manage. None of these analogies maps cleanly onto the present case. Each suggests, in its own way, that hollowing tends to be self-reinforcing, because each migration of function further weakens the institution from which the function migrates, which makes further migration easier, which weakens the institution further. The thing tends to ratchet.
The third question, the one most readers want answered and the one I am least confident about, is what to do about it. There is a kind of writing about institutional decline that ends with a list of policy prescriptions, and there is a kind of writing that ends with a counsel of despair, and I want to do neither of these things, because I do not believe either is honest. The hollowed institution is not going to be reformed by a list of legislative proposals, because the legislative process is itself one of the most thoroughly hollowed institutions in the inventory, and any list of proposals to reform anything has to pass through a process that has lost the capacity to convert proposals into law. And it is not going to be confronted by despair either, because despair is itself a way of conceding the premise the hollowed institution most wants you to concede, which is that the function has gone permanently and the form is all that remains. Function does not go permanently. It goes somewhere. The political question of our moment is whether we can locate it, name it, and reattach it to forms that are willing to be accountable for it.
This is what the data center activists in Virginia and Tennessee and Mississippi are doing, with no national coordination and very little press attention, and what makes their case worth studying. They have located a function, the actual decision about whether AI infrastructure gets built and on what terms, at the level at which it is now being made, which is the county zoning board and the state public utility commission and the federal courthouse hearing the Clean Air Act suit. They are working at that level because that is where the function went. They are not waiting for the federal apparatus to recover its capacity to act, because they have correctly diagnosed that the federal apparatus is performing the form of national policy while the actual decisions are being taken elsewhere. This is a useful template. It works because it abandons the assumption that the form is where the action is, and instead follows the function to its current address. It does not require the federal apparatus to be restored before useful work can be done. It does not require any particular theory of national renewal. It requires only the willingness to look at the institutional surface, register that the labels on it no longer correspond to what is happening underneath, and act on the underneath.
I think the reason this strikes me as important, beyond the strategic question of where citizens should put their effort, is that it points at something the existing political vocabulary has trouble seeing. We are accustomed to thinking that the great political question is who controls the institutions. The hollowing diagnosis suggests that the great political question, at least for the moment, is what the institutions control. In many cases, the answer is much less than they used to. The form of the office of the President is enormously powerful. The actual scope of unilateral presidential action, once you account for what the courts will not enforce, what the bureaucracy will not implement, what the markets will not accept, and what the foreign partners will not coordinate with, is a moving target that has narrowed considerably even as the rhetoric of presidential power has expanded. The form of the Supreme Court is enormously authoritative. The actual capacity of the Supreme Court to compel compliance, when the executive simply declines to facilitate the return of a wrongly deported person and the lower courts find probable cause for criminal contempt and the administration responds by trying to deport him to Liberia instead, is a question that the Court itself has not fully answered, because answering it would require it to admit that the question can be asked.
Hollowed institutions do not announce themselves. They cannot. The announcement would require an institutional voice capable of acknowledging the gap between its form and its function, and that capacity is precisely what hollowing erodes. The announcement therefore has to come from outside the institution, from observers who can see the gap and are willing to name it. This is what writers and journalists and scholars are for, in moments of this kind, and it is a kind of work that has its own pathologies, including the temptation to mistake naming the problem for solving it, and the temptation to mistake the elegance of the diagnosis for its truth. I have tried, in these two essays, to be careful about both. The pattern is real. The pattern is not the whole story. The pattern is not destiny.
What I can say with some confidence is that the experience most Americans report this spring, of being governed by institutions that look intact and feel hollow, of a country in which everything still works and nothing does what it says, is not a failure of perception. It is an accurate read of an unusual situation. The country is not in collapse. The country is not in revolution. The country is in a regime of hollowing, in which forms persist and functions migrate, and the migration is the actual political event, even though the migration is not what is being reported and is mostly not even what is being argued about. The arguments are about who should hold the offices. The offices are not where the work is being done. Until the public conversation can catch up to where the work has gone, the conversation will continue to feel beside the point, because it will be beside the point.
The greengrocer in Havel’s parable does not, in the end, take down the slogan because someone proves to him that workers of the world have not in fact united. He takes it down, when he takes it down, because he reaches a moment in which performing the form has become more costly to him than admitting the gap. The condition of being able to reach that moment, Havel argued, was the prior development of a parallel vocabulary in which the gap could be named without immediately being absorbed back into the official one. The vocabulary had to come first. The action followed. I am, in the end, only trying to contribute a word. The word is hollowing. It is not the only word that will be needed. It is one that I think we cannot do without. The institutions are still standing. They are not doing what they say. The distance between those two facts is the country we now live in, and it is the distance we will have to learn to map, name, and travel, before any further question about American politics in 2026 can be sensibly addressed.
Sources include the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, U.S. Central Command, the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations, and the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations; polling from the NBC News Decision Desk Poll, the Silver Bulletin, Reuters/Ipsos, AP-NORC, and CNN; reporting by CBS News, NPR, Reuters, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, the Hill, Government Executive, Reason, Fortune, and Law Dork; and movement documentation from Data Center Watch, the Piedmont Environmental Council, MediaJustice, the NAACP, Earthjustice, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Theoretical references draw on Hannah Arendt, Václav Havel, Wolfgang Streeck, Francis Fukuyama, James C. Scott, Samuel Huntington, Peter Turchin, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Mark Fisher, David Graeber, Anne Applebaum, Martin Gurri, Joseph Tainter, John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan, Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, Stephen D. Krasner, and Clifford Geertz.
Thanks. Very painful, but immensely helpful in that it maps out what needs to be explored. Makes you feel less helpless. From where I stand and live it's also the hollowing out of religion and education that contributes the the going "rogue".
Kind of like US "democracy" in general for the last few...decades
I found the desperate calls to "get out and vote to save our democracy!" prior to the last presidential election to be some high irony considering they were presumably aimed at voters who did, along with the majority of their fellow Americans, did get out and vote only to watch the candidate with fewer votes become president. A subset of those experienced that twice